I'm sitting at Dean One, eating my lunch, as Jon is working on Dean Two. He taps me on the shoulder to show me some pages he found on a Google search for cat juggling. "Oh, you can do better than that!" I say, and proceed to run a search of my own. Here are my results, poignant and ridiculous:

Rosebud

Bert Lahr

American Taliban

When the news first broke of an American national being found in the midst of the Taliban forces, and the identity of John Walker Lindh was broadcast across the aether, one of the graduate students in the lab claimed to have grown up next door to John Lindh and to have played with him in their adjoining yards. No one believed him until the next morning when I answered the lab phone (I'm the only person in the lab who does) and was greeted by a Federal Agent who said it was imperative that he contact my labmate. I explained that he was not in the lab, but would return shortly, which was not what the agent wanted to hear, and wondered whether their voice recognition software was putting a black mark in my FBI folder. The student brought in some pictures from a scrapbook of him and the American Taliban playing together as children. It has colored my reading of the news regarding the American Taliban to be a friend of a friend.

I was reminded of John Lindh as I was reading the website of the REAL American Taliban, David McNamara. McNamara calls himself "anti-porn guy," which is an understatement of all that he is against. The parallels between his views and those of the Taliban are a stark reminder that all religious fundamentalism is the same, regardless of the religion in hides behind. It is also a reminder that as we point our collective American fingers at Islam we are ignoring our own lunatic fringe, who are just as dangerous and far better funded than Al Qaeda.

Like most websearchers, I will from time to time enter my own name into Google to see what my doppelganger is up to. Over the years, I've found several sites by and about Onken's and decided to collect them at Onken.org, which I maintain and of which I am the sole visitor. One of my favorite Onken sites is Uwe Onken Fishing Tours. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the site, beside my longing to go on one of his tours, is his icon.
Sure he's got pictures of people with salmon, trout, pollack, and pike (and lots of halibut), but his icon has a picture of a fish's head that doesn't look very good to eat. After searching through his site, I finally found pictures of guests who had caught the ugly beast, which he referred to as Steinbeißer ("rock-biter"). I looked it up in my German-English dictionary, which translated Steinbeißer as "loach." Now I had a tropical fish tank years back, and I never saw a loach as large and ugly as that thing! So, I did some more searching and found another German site that gave Seewolf as an alternate name for Steinbeißer. The head turned out to be that of a wolf fish, a coldwater blenny that can grow to a meter in length. I'm told they are delicious and make handsome purses.

The Science Hobbyist is a site maintained by Bill Beaty that is full of fun stuff, including Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments. Having been the first member of my family to purposely put a fork in the microwave to make sparks, I was excited to see someone else purposely breaking the rules. I only wish he'd included the Sparking Grapes Experiment.

I was teaching Problem Based Learning to highschoolers last week, and decided to break from my two years of using AIDS as a topic and have them research cancer instead. As I was trying to recall the origins of oncogene names via Google, for my own edification, I came across the Cancer Bacteria Homepage, which insists that cancer is caused by bacterial infection, specifically by certain mycoplasms, and that cancer patients should give up their present therapies and go on an antibiotic regimen. This is one of those instances where the freedom of webspeech goes from humorous and quirky to indifferent and dangerous. The fact that the reams of evidence demonstrating how totally ineffective antibiotics are at fighting cancer can be so easily ignored just to have a provocative website at the expense of others' health seems more than a bit criminal to me.